Around three-quarters of all deaths in earthquakes are due to building collapse – and poor people bear the brunt. As rescue efforts continue in Nepal, Robin Cross argues for safer, more resilient reconstruction

Collapsed buildings in Kathmandu following the earthquake on 25 April.
Photograph: UPI/Landov/Barcroft Media

The kind of earthquake that hit Nepal last week is a periodic event in the country: the last was in 1934. For years, the international community knew another big quake was due in Kathmandu. The disaster is that we have not prepared sufficiently for a predictable event. In a world of increased urban densification, rapidly expanding informal settlements and development that outstrips a government’s ability to enforce standards, it is poorly designed and constructed buildings, not earthquakes, which are the real catastrophe.

In many cases, the rush of urbanisation has produced some of the most dangerous built environments: multi-storey buildings, over-reliance on concrete and a loss of knowledge that protected previous generations. The pressure to meet the needs of growing populations, along with improperly implemented building regulations, can lead to lethal weakness. This was demonstrated in China in 2008 when the Sichuan earthquake destroyed over 7,000 recent but inadequately engineered schools, killing thousands of schoolchildren.

Around three-quarters of all deaths in earthquakes are due to building collapse. Low-cost and informal buildings are most likely to fail, meaning that earthquakes disproportionately affect the poorest in the community, and usually leave them even poorer. The technology and skills to practically eliminate this scale of fatality are available. Yet they are not reaching the people who need them most. Earthquakes are not just a “natural” crisis: they reflect a poverty crisis.

This is a development problem produced by a failure to incorporate risk and resilience into long-term planning. An earthquake shouldn’t have to be the impetus to “build back better” after lives have already been destroyed. Building better should start from day one.

After a disaster like Nepal’s earthquake, the international community needs to assist in long-term, safe reconstruction. If it does not, the construction will be carried out in an ad-hoc manner, with unplanned reconstruction and inadequate skills resulting in unsafe buildings. This pattern locks poor communities into a cycle of vulnerability, leaving them unprotected against the next earthquake. Nepal’s reconstruction is so crucial because it is an opportunity to take the global community’s combined knowledge and do better. It is more important than ever to focus not only on providing immediate relief, but to deliver a more resilient, stronger built environment that will not produce a repeat tragedy of this scale again.

The international community is practiced at disaster response in the short term – flying in rescue teams, distributing medical supplies and setting up temporary shelters – but this only treats the symptoms of an earthquake. The underlying problem is a vulnerable built environment. As the emergency passes, this cause gets forgotten: the trauma of earthquakes makes people want to forget, but when that amnesia reaches the institutional level, then history repeats itself.

People take shelter at the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, Nepal, one of the buildings to survive the earthquake. Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP

The start date to prepare for Nepal’s next earthquake is now. Lessons in resilience do not only come from new technology and modern building techniques, but from the past as well. Five-storey pagodas in Japan and China have stood through a thousand years of earthquakes without collapse due to their natural seismic qualities, as has the 1,500-year-old Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu, now host to a tragic number of funeral rites. A home-reconstruction programme in Pakistan, led by Article 25, has adapted traditional building techniques to give them better seismic resilience, delivering homes that draw on old and new technology alike to keep their inhabitants as safe as possible through another earthquake.

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Ways to rebuild safely and improve resilience are already known, and indeed have been demonstrated: in Concepcion, Chile, the 2010 earthquake was the sixth largest on record, but fatalities remained under 1,000, in large part due to effective implementation of building regulations. And disasters constantly provide new lessons on how to improve resilience, not just of the built environment, but of social and community structures, too. After Hurricane Katrina, a New Orleans-based organisation called Evacuteer erected 14ft metal sculptures of a person with their arm raised, engineered to withstand Category 5 hurricanes, at key collection points or “evacuspots”.

Knowledge is not lacking in Nepal, either. The country experiences several small to medium earthquakes a year, it has a National Society for Earthquake Technology, and it has created a set of building safety standards. It knows the importance of resilient reconstruction. But disaster funding remains reactionary, with the lion’s share of spending going towards short-term response. In 29 years, the Global Facility for Disaster Risk and Recovery (GFDRR) allocated only 2% of total development assistance to disaster-related activities. Of this, only 3.6% was for disaster prevention and preparedness.

Or take Haiti: it had one of the highest densities of NGOs before the 2010 earthquake, yet none of this long-term work gave the country the resilience it needed against a known threat. After the quake, millions of pounds were raised in response, but the necessary focus on safe reconstruction was not met, and five years on, many sites in Port au Prince stand empty.

A camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, for people displaced by the 2010 earthquake. Photograph: Dieu Nalio Chery/AP

Community hubs, and especially schools, are a priority for reconstruction because they give children a step back into normality and provide essential childcare services, allowing their adult families to return to work or participate in further reconstruction. An earthquake- and hurricane-proof building can function every day as a school or health centre, but also then becomes a lifesaving shelter against an incoming storm or deadly aftershocks.

International cooperation needs to focus on preventing disasters proactively, not reactively. We have the technology and skills to make the difference between thousands of deaths and no deaths, but these lessons are not reaching far enough. Physical resilience must be embedded throughout all development, permanently, not just months or years after an earthquake. Disasters are “when” not “if” events. Only comprehensive strategies of resilience will be able to prevent another Nepal.

Robin Cross is managing director of Article 25, an architectural aid charity. In the wake of the recent earthquake, Article 25 has launched an appeal to support a school building programme in Nepal.

• This article was amended on 15 May 2015. An earlier version said that after Hurricane Katrina, “residents didn’t know where their evacuation points were in the city”. To clarify: there were no official evacuation points at the time, although there were designated “shelters of last resort”.